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Gene Wolfe
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 Gene Wolfe is a retired engineer and technical editor with an interest in abnormal psychology. He
came to prominence in the field through his short fiction which appeared in many volumes of the original
anthology series Orbit in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Orbit's editorial position in the SF field emphasized the
stylistic accomplishments of its writers and deemphasized the scientific and technological grounding of the stories
-- when the stories had any, introducing higher literary standards into a field already in ferment from the
controversies surrounding the New Wave of the 1960s. So Wolfe's initial reputation was as a writer far
removed from hard SF traditions. "I was getting started in the mid-sixties (my first sale came in 1965). . . . What
happened was that editors stopped buying that type of story, save from established hard SF writers. SF's
direction is determined not by what writers want to write or by what readers want to read, but by what editors want to
buy."
By the early 1980s it had become obvious that a substantial amount of his fiction was indeed based
on innovative science and technology used metaphorically. Characteristically, however, the science and
technology were in some fashion concealed while the literary artifice was strikingly evident. Wolfe's first
mature book, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, set on an alien planet, featured robots, colonists, a mysterious alien race.
But it was constructed with so much sophisticated literary ambiguity that it was not apprehended as hard sf.
Like Theodore Sturgeon's, Wolfe's stories are widely admired for literary craftsmanship. The
most extreme case of this is his masterpiece to date, the four-volume The Book of the New Sun, set in the far distant
future on an Earth grown old with the passage of eons, with a sun in need of renewal. Strange
technologies abound, but the affect is of fantasy (especially since the characters do not understand the science of
their world), and it marked the beginning of nearly a decade in which much of Wolfe's fiction was fantasy (such
as Soldier of the Mist, 1986) or horror (much of his short fiction), not sf. Yet his science fiction, like Ballard's
or Le Guin's, is deeply indebted to science and richly embedded with technology.
This story was sparked in part by a technical paper in Physics Letters entitled "The Creation of
Universes Out of Nothing" which discussed how our universe might have been produced by quantum tunneling. In
Wolfe's hands, this becomes a literary conceit. Such is his stature in the genre that Wolfe's impact on the
uses of science in science fiction is beginning to exert a transforming power on other writers (see Michael
Swanwick's recent novel, Stations of the
Tide). The hard sf of the next generation may reject his style -- or
be changed by it.
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The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. | ||
Cramer: On Science & Science Fiction || Hartwell: Hard Science Fiction
David G. Hartwell || Kathryn Cramer || About Tor Books || Ordering Info
Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.